What the Haryana and J&K verdict means for India’s top political leaders
What do the assembly election results imply for the country’s top leaders? Prashant Jha analyses the verdict and its impact.
What do the assembly election results imply for the country’s top leaders? Prashant Jha analyses the verdict and its impact.
Narendra Modi
The BJP’s political incentives lie in attributing every electoral success to PM Narendra Modi, while deflecting the blame for every electoral setback to other factors . But irrespective of what suits the BJP’s narrative, the Haryana verdict does offer two propositions. The BJP would probably not have been able to pull off the surprise win if Modi weren’t the presiding leader and the overarching face of the party. And the win will help replenish Modi’s political stock.
The Lok Sabha outcome left the PM in power, but undoubtedly with diminished political capital. Every other actor in the political system, from the bureaucracy to the opposition, had begun reading in it signs of decline and therefore begun altering calculations. The Haryana verdict’s big implication for the PM is that it helps reinforce his authority and sends a message to the political system that Modi remains in control, his party remains dominant, and that it is premature to write BJP’s obituaries or even predict that 2024 marked the beginning of the end. This, in turn, gives Modi more political space than he has perhaps enjoyed since June 4, 2024. The state where he helped run party affairs as general secretary in the late 1990s has come back to help Modi at a time of need almost a quarter of a century later.
Beyond Haryana and politics though, the outcome in Kashmir too strengthens Modi’s hand as the prime minister of India. It gives the Indian state a powerful argument of the vitality of democracy, and allows the PM to showcase the popular mandate in an area that is an inalienable part of India to the rest of the world.
Amit Shah
The 2024 Lok Sabha elections raised questions about Amit Shah’s political management, for it was an open secret that irrespective of the constitution of the parliamentary board or the official designations of party office bearers, Shah exercised extraordinary influence over the party’s political and electoral decisions.
Haryana shows that political observers were yet again mistaken in underestimating Shah, for the key elements that have helped the BJP since he first became an influential national figure in 2014 continue to yield dividends. These include extensive research into constituency level dynamics, the ability to weave caste coalitions that bring together a conglomeration of smaller communities in an alliance against a more dominant community, ruthless ticket distribution and willingness to change the leadership at the very top ahead of elections to overcome anti-incumbency, constant worker mobilisation, and an ability to sow divisions within opposition ranks. All of it clearly helped in Haryana, showing why Shah remains Modi’s most trusted aide.
Read more: BJP clinches hat-trick in Haryana, Cong-NC victorious in J&K| 7 Big Takeaways
Kashmir is both a win and a loss for Shah. It is a win for the home minister has effectively run the UT since August 5, 2019 and he decided on the sequence of political change, of elections and then possible restoration of statehood even as others in government were suggesting that it be the other way round. He has now pulled it off. Yet, the BJP’s hopes to win enough seats in Jammu and cobble together an alliance with independents to install its own CM failed, a clear electoral setback and a message from the Kashmiri street that a vote doesn’t mean support. For the party to think that it could remain a Hindutva juggernaut in the rest of India, and win the confidence of Kashmiris, was always going to be a stretch and the results have shown the BJP that the trust deficit with the region’s Muslims remains deep.
Rahul Gandhi
The election verdict shows the Congress leadership that its 2024 tally of 99 seats in Lok Sabha may have been better than its 2019 tally of 52 seats, but that it is a long way to 272 . But in the past four months, the party had almost begun behaving like it had won the national elections. Haryana has sent Rahul Gandhi a reminder that the Indian electorate chose him to lead the opposition, but doesn’t yet trust him enough to run the government.
Gandhi deservedly drew accolades for his ability to weave a wider anti-BJP coalition, find a message on caste that fractured BJP’s Hindu coalition (irrespective of whether the demand for caste census is what India needs), and hammer home a message on class that focused on inflation and unemployment. Haryana should have been an ideal ground for this message, especially when combined with farmers’ protest, Agniveer backlash, and the genuine anger at the way the state’s women wrestlers have been treated.
But Gandhi failed to manage the internal contradictions between the party’s three separate Hooda, Selja and Surjewala factions. He failed to construct a wider caste coalition that went beyond Jats. His message that focused on BJP removing reservations failed to convince Dalits or backward communities again, showing that perhaps the same trick doesn’t necessarily work. Kashmir brought more hopeful news for the leader who traces his roots to the region. It will give the Congress a presence in the fifth government of the country, the second in north India. But this will largely be because the Congress was in alliance with National Conference, the real star of the elections in the UT. To sustain the momentum of the Lok Sabha outcome, it has now become imperative for Gandhi to do well in both Maharashtra and Jharkhand.
Omar Abdullah
In 2014, Omar Abdullah lost power. In 2019, he lost his state, and along with it, his personal freedom for eight months. In 2024, he lost parliamentary elections. The challenge of navigating the fine line between loyalty to the Indian Union, and winning the confidence and trust of the Kashmiri street, a line that his party had maintained for most of independent India’s history, had only become harder in the decade that the BJP was in power.
But Abdullah stayed resilient and, on Tuesday, he was rewarded. Kashmiris clearly saw that even as radicals and terrorists frame NC as a sellout to Delhi, and Delhi treats NC as a corrupt and dynastic party that flirts with the secessionist line, Abdullah had remained relatively honest about his political line. He hadn’t gone and allied with the BJP like Mehbooba Mufti had; he had paid a personal price; he hadn’t become irresponsibly radical; he participated in elections despite his initial reservations; and if Kashmiris wanted a somewhat autonomous but responsible voice who could fight for them but also pay attention to governance in difficult circumstances with limited power, it was probably Omar Abdullah.
The results vindicate Abdullah and for his contribution in keeping the Kashmiri mainstream alive, the Indian State owes the third generation Kashmiri politician a debt. The best way to pay that debt to him, but also to the Kashmiri people, is to restore statehood as promised.
Mehbooba Mufti
Mehbooba Mufti’s big contribution in this election is that by participating in it, she helped legitimise the election just like NC did. But the outcome of the election can perhaps best be explained by the decision her late father, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, took a decade ago when he allied with the BJP.
In one stroke, that decision destroyed the PDP’s distinctive space in Kashmiri politics of being more radical than the NC in how it critiqued the Indian state and engaged with separatists, yet operating within the Indian constitutional framework. PDP, even more than NC, was now seen as Delhi’s party, only confirming suspicions in the valley that it was initially a deep state creation. Mufti’s death saw Mehbooba take over as CM but she remained uncomfortable in the position that she was in, torn between her instinctive sympathy for the street when Kashmir was burning and her survival that was linked to BJP’s patronage and support. Eventually, the Centre made the decision for her, as the BJP withdrew support and dissolved the assembly, leaving her in political Nowhere. August 5, 2019 was an even bigger blow to her than Abdullah, for Kashmiris blamed her for enabling BJP’s presence in the first place.
Tuesday’s dismal results for PDP can only be explained in this backdrop of the past decade of Mehbooba’s political turns. It has a message for her, but it also has a message that political forces in the valley that come close to or are seen as close to the BJP won’t find a warm reception in their constituencies.
Bhupinder Singh Hooda
The 77-year old Congress warhorse may have lost his final battle. The man who ran Haryana for ten years between 2005 and 2014 got marginalised after the Lok Sabha and state assembly defeats that year. He then fought an internal battle within the Congress, largely against Rahul Gandhi, to gain control over the party’s affairs in the state between 2014 and 2019.
Hooda did end up getting his say, but just months before the 2019 state assembly election. The fact that the Congress was able to put up a credible performance in quick time five years ago was seen as a testament to Hooda’s skills and gave him continued control. The 2024 Lok Sabha election, where the party won five seats, further boosted his power. And this assembly election was supposed to be crowing moment of his political career, as he aimed to politically secure Haryana for himself and his son, Deepinder Hooda.
But the script went awry. Hooda may have been a powerful leader, but he was a powerful Jat leader. And the BJP once again proved to have a better handle on social diversity than its critics give it credit for. The more Hooda’s power grew, the more Jat political figures behaved like they were about to return to power, the more the BJP was able to capitalise on the fear and resentment that exists among other communities in Haryana against Jats. Add to it Hooda’s rivalries with other state leaders, or the unwillingness of these leaders to accept Hooda’s leadership, and internal fractures only deepened. All of this wasn’t visible before the elections, but the outcome has clearly shown the trap Congress finds itself in. It did as well as it did primarily because of Hooda, but it couldn’t go past the finish line primarily because of Hooda.
Nayab Singh Saini
It is hard to tangibly quantify the contribution of a leader who the central leadership picked as the chief minister in the final year of its ten year rule in the state to an election victory. Maybe he was far more skilled than outsiders knew, or maybe he was just the right person in the right place at the right time, or maybe the constellation of the right social base and the right political personality for the times worked well for him. But the star of the Haryana election, and therefore its biggest beneficiary, is Nayab Singh Saini.
The former MP, former state minister, and former state party chief replaced Modi’s aide, Manohar Lal Khattar this March. But the power transition was smoother than it usually is for Saini was also Khattar’s pick. Saini’s biggest advantage clearly was the fact that he became a face around which non-Jat backward communities in the state could rally, seeing in his elevation the BJP’s commitment to their empowerment. Saini also was focused on taking cabinet decisions, be it on Agniveers or on issues related to farmers, that dealt with the sources of discontent in the state that the Lok Sabha setback had made apparent. The fact that he was low profile and avoided controversies probably helped.
Fifteen years ago, in a state assembly election, Saini came fifth. Today, he is the freshly elected chief minister of Haryana with a mandate that he can claim as his own. That is the story of Indian democracy, and it is also the story of the BJP’s ability to pick from within its ranks rooted leaders who ended up coming into their own when the big moment arrives.